What would you do if you adopted a Chinese child and then suspected it had been corruptly stolen by Chinese officials and sold to an orphanage? You remember handing over $US3000 in cash to the orphanage. Now you are worried, after reading a news story by Barbara Demick in the Los Angeles Times.

Naturally, you ask the government of the rich country where you live, to investigate. This is exactly what Cathy Wagner, a resident of Nova Scotia in Canada, did when she read the story. She was deeply alarmed by the story’s implications for the child’s natural family if the allegations it contained turned out to be true.

She would be “heartbroken” and already she was “very scared”, according to the story in Pound Pup Legacy, a website dedicated to the safety of children.

But Canada’s department of Citizenship and Immigration did not respond to requests for comment, so we don’t know if there have been other complaints. We don’t know if any investigations have been conducted already.

In China, the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs also refused to comment when questioned by the LA Times journalist.

Officials of the agency have told foreign diplomats that they believe that the abuses are limited to a small number of babies and that those responsible have been removed and punished.

So it’s happened in the past but there’s no problem now.

So much for the complaints by grieving parents in Tianxi village, Guizhou province, who complained that officials had stormed their house, snatched their children, and told them to say nothing about the kidnapping. One of them, Yang Shuiying, even told her he was going to sell her child for adoption.

Fat chance Xinhua, the Chinese official news agency, will take up the story and run with it. It’s just another case of ‘foreign meddling’ as far as they’re concerned, I guess.